Genetics

Tag archives for Genetics

One of the more substantive consequences of the powerful new genomic techniques has been in the area of ancient DNA extraction and analysis. The Neandertal genome story is arguably the sexiest, but closer to the present day there’ve been plenty of results which have changed the way we look at the past. The input of…

A western Eurasian male is found in 2000-year-old elite Xiongnu cemetery in Northeast Mongolia: We analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), Y-chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (Y-SNP), and autosomal short tandem repeats (STR) of three skeletons found in a 2,000-year-old Xiongnu elite cemetery in Duurlig Nars of Northeast Mongolia. This study is one of the first reports of…

Sometimes scientists report on research which clarifies what we already know. ‘Survival of the Cutest’ Proves Darwin Right: The study, published in The American Naturalist on January 20, 2010, compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, to which dogs belong along with cats, bears, weasels, civets…

One of the things about evolution you sometimes hear is that it has “stopped” for humans. Steve Jones, a British geneticist, is one of the more prominent public expositors of this viewpoint today. The key fact that most people latch on to is that infant and child mortality is very low, so the vast majority…

Weird but fun list, SNPedia’s Top 10 SNPs of the Year: SNPedia now contains nearly 10,000 SNPs and to welcome 2010 we’d like to highlight at least 10. These SNPs have been selected based on an elusive and ultimately subjective combination of medical importance, statistical believability, and overall general interest. This isn’t objective science though,…

Last month I pointed to two papers on China genetics. Rereading a bit more closely, I stumbled upon a very curious PC plot. It shows the relationship of various continental populations on the first two principal components of variation genetically. Look at how Mexican Americans from Los Angeles compare to Gujarati Americans from Houston: In…

According to search engine traffic one of the most popular posts on this weblog has to do with the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. That is, those Jews whose ancestors derive from Central & Eastern Europe, and the overwhelming number of Jews in the United States. The genetic origins of this group are fraught with…

The New York Times has an article on cousin marriage that’s up. Here’s some important bits: Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her “cusband,” proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends, and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not…

No, this isn’t about intellectual property issues and piracy. Whole Genome Distribution and Ethnic Differentiation of Copy Number Variation in Caucasian and Asian Populations: Although copy number variation (CNV) has recently received much attention as a form of structure variation within the human genome, knowledge is still inadequate on fundamental CNV characteristics such as occurrence…

The Spittoon points to a new paper, Drawing the history of the Hutterite population on a genetic landscape: inference from Y-chromosome and mtDNA genotypes, which I’ve been meaning to look at more closely. Unlike some attempts to use genetics to illuminate questions about the human past here the historical record is rather complete. The 16th…